Love is a Force of Nature

Last night I saw the Milwaukee premiere of Brokeback Mountain. In fact, I saw it as part of a fundraiser for Center Advocates to pull in some money to defeat the marriage amendment in Wisconsin and so 10K and 3 hours (there was a party, natch) later, I was feeling pretty good. Of course, it's Milwaukee and so we're just getting the film now so I have to say that I was somewhat ruined by all the hype. But after 24 hours, things are layering out.

I have always been struck by the ways people love - how we fall into it, and how we stay the course. What is great about this story for me is how these two men build a life together even though they love from two different vantage points. Ennis, the strong silent type, starts out as a reluctant participant allowing himself to explore a connection, a feeling. Over the course of his life that is rockier than the mountains he flees to, he realizes that he is happiest with Jack. Unwilling to take a risk and conditioned into fear, his love and his commitment grow despite ever present regret. He is consumed emotionally.

Jack, I think, is different. To me, he seemed the instigator - the one who knows what he wants and goes for it, the one who isn't happy unless he rides for the whole 8 seconds. I felt like he was so happy to have someone in his life with whom he could be completely honest about himself. That power fueled his love. To me it seemed that he was more in love with the idea of Ennis than Ennis himself - that he wanted so much to have the life that he truly desired that it didn't matter who it was with. What crushes him in the end is the knowledge that his love would be unrequited, at least to the extent and the freedom that he wants. Ultimately, he is consumed physically.

Personally, I don't know why the anti-gay agenda is so against everyone going to see this film. Unless, of course, they themselves haven't bothered to watch it. Marriages break up, lives are destroyed, everybody winds up miserable because of this love affair. Seems like the perfect roll of yellow CAUTION tape surrounding everything gay. Unless they saw what we saw last night which is that you just can't fight or change who or how you love.

What made this movie sad for me was how hard these starcrossed two tried. Though they were fated to fail, these two found a connection if only on the mountain. And even then they found themselves working off different pages. You just want them to be together. You want to reach into the screen from your 21st century seat and pull them out of their machismo laden unforgiving era. You want to pat them on the back as if to say "just go for it, it'll be OK", reassuring them that as the decades move forward, things will get better.

And as the fundraiser reminded me, we still continue to have the same hope that things will.

The Princes of Egypt

The New York Times ran an article this week revisiting the ancient tomb of two men who held the role of royal manicurists. The last time we met these Egyptian spa gods, the hubbub surrounding the discovery of their tomb was that they were possibly a gay couple - the first gay couple in fact to have such prime real estate literally and historically. This thoery would answer questions left unexplained by the prevailing idea that they were just twins (very close twins). The gay world breathed a sigh of victory and snickered at the stereotypical fact that they did indeed do fierce nails.

The new theory brings back the twin thing but suggests that they were conjoined twins which would explain some of the closeness in the pictographs. And while it all makes sense to me, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by the ease at which archeologists were willing to dismiss the gay thing. In fact, the article quotes the scientists as considering homosexual royal manicurists as the least plausible possibility. I mean, couldn't they just leave well enough alone? But one of the scientists said something about how the ancient Egyptians viewed the differences in people. It inspired me and I think it is somewhat timely in our fundamentalist era. "Such attributes were often seen as fabulous rather than monstrous, and positive rather than negative," Dr. O'Connor said. "They attested the creator god's ability, if he wished, to bring wondrous changes upon the norms he himself had established." It is the scientist's take on the age old phrase 'God don't make no junk.' Take that, Religious Right.

Essentially, I agree that in the interest of science and history and anthropology, one needs to consider all scenarios in order to get it right. I guess I just want to believe that through the ages there was boy on boy love and it was a good thing, maybe even celebrated. That somewhere in the desert Whitney and Mariah are really singing "there can be miracles, if you believe" in an ancient Disney soundtrack (how gay would that be). That Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum locked in a lover's embrace, were buried, only to be found centuries later in order to give us inspiration to keep on fighting for our lives, for our relationships, and for our cuticles.

Raisins Suck

Today at Beans and Barley, I threw a hissy. All I wanted was a bag of oriental snack food (you know, with wasabi peas, rice crackers, peanuts) and every single bag of snacks had raisins in it. EVERY. SINGLE. BAG. Even the non-oriental mix snack bags. Ughrhgh. Raisins are in everything and they totally ruin it. Oatmeal cookies? Ruined. Granola? Ruined. Oriental fucking snack mix? Ruined! And half the time you don't even know they're there until it's too late, mimicking chocolate chips or mixing in with the other fruit. And p.s. there is nothing oriental about raisins so what the f are they doing in a bag of "oriental" snack mix?

I have absolutely no idea why I hate raisins. It is completely irrational. I really like grapes so it's not where the raisin came from, and i have no problem eating prunes (unless they're canned)so it's not like I have issues with dried fruit. Except now that I think about it, I can't stand sundried tomatoes either. But whatever it is, I wish raisins would go away or at least stop sabotaging my food. I was forced to buy separate bags of the ingredients in the oriental snack mix and make my own mix. Now I have waaaaaay too much snack and it is in all the wrong proportions and they didn't have rice crackers so I had to use pumpkin seeds which is so not the same thing.

My friends are having a very cool party tonight and I have to work so I can't go. Work is like raisins sabotaging the oriental snack mix of life.

the number we end up with

"You can safely become the person you always wanted to be, or the person you were always scared you would become." So says main character Anjou Lovett in Beth Goldner's tale of grief. She is referring to meeting strangers on the train but the same could be said for being a crazy person.

Synopsis (and I'm not giving anything away): Woman meets man on train, woman begins romantic relationship with man, woman finds out man is married, man leaves wife for woman, man starts cheating on woman (surprise surprise), man leaves woman1 for woman2, man gets run over by a car, and then bringing it all full circle, woman1 becomes train wreck. Get it, they met on a train and then she becomes a train wreck?

OK, that's just the back story. Seriously, this was supposed to be a touching story about how one woman deals with her issues of abandonment and grief by working for the Census Bureau. And if the book jacket described it like that, I never would have bought the thing. But of course, I fell for the morose and disturbing storyline and the promise of a character finding redemption in a journey. What I got was a woman so annoying that if I was her friend when she went off the deep end, I would have let her drown.

I'm sure that I wouldn't be so critical if I had read at least one good book since this summer but I am starting to feel like I am losing my touch in choosing new material. Therefore, I am moving on to the sure thing. Joan Didion will not let me down. Welcome to the Year of Magical Thinking.

World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day. I've had a day to think about my life in the era of the AIDS epidemic and how it has affected me, my relationships, and the relationship I have with my community. I've had a day to remember how AIDS has come into my life.

In my lifetime, it seems that we have come a long way though maybe not fast enough. In my college bioethics class I wrote a controversial thesis on the practice of fasttracking experimental HIV medications. The year was 1989 and at the time, AZT was the only real name on the block. Protease Inhibitors and drug cocktails were laboratory concoctions and scientific studies waiting for the light of day. All around us we were being asked to ACT UP and that silence equaled death. People were passionate about doing big things in big ways.

As I entered into the 90's on the cusp of a new millenium, the face of AIDS changed. The drugs became available and the gaunt faces were replaced with a new face, one that could climb mountains both literal and proverbial during this fight. AIDS became something surmountable. I became a doctor during this time. I watched the complacency begin at the same time I still saw the struggle. And then I saw a poster, an ad really. It read "When they discover a cure for AIDS, will you be able to say that you did your part?" I remember the first time I walked into the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin to be trained on the AIDS information helpline. I met so many neat people dedicated to doing big things in many small ways, just like myself. I would go on to other various duties like packaging and delivering food, working in the library, and attending the numerous fundraisers the Center would have throughout the year. But seemingly, the numbers continue to climb and the faces still look forward to a cure that still seems out of reach.

During this time, I also became a proud member of the gay community and AIDS could no longer be someone else's disease. Like I imagine every gay man does, I have friends with the disease. I sat before them as they tearfully disclosed their seroconversion with a mix of disbelief, fear, and defiance . And I tearfully looked back at them with a mix of heartbreak and anger - heartbreak for a life now altered forever, anger that it never should have happened in the first place. I fear that as gay men, we are made to feel as though control has been taken away from us. The question of contracting AIDS being not if, but when. Not won't, but could. Will it never be enough to know?

If it seems as though I am losing hope, I am. Numbers continue to climb, prevention education pushes seem to have been abandoned, money is running out, gay men are deluded by their own sense of sexual health and fortitude, our government has adopted a "cut them loose" conservatism, the whole thing seems generationally cliche. But if it seems as though I am giving up, I am not. When I think of how far we've come in my life, and where we could be before my life is over, I am encouraged. And so I will walk, donate, educate, be a role model, and do my part so that one day World AIDS Day will be a day to remember not only how AIDS came into our lives, but also how it left.